Tell Us: What’s Your Dream Game?

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We work far too hard entertaining you. You do some work for a bit. I want you to describe your dream game. It’s not quite as ambiguous as it sounds.

For instance, my dream game, as I’ve written about before, is one that just lets me calmly survive. I want a vast island to explore, filled with treats to discover, but only if I can keep myself alive. I want to need to build a shelter with the physics of a Penumbra game, hunt for food using a bow and arrow I’ve made by stringing a branch and wedging a flint and feathers into a stick, building fires, and so on. The key difference between my game and all those I’ve tried that people have recommended is 1) it’s good, and 2) it’s not about frantically monitoring unrealistic levels. I am a greedy chap, but I don’t need to eat sixteen chickens an hour to stay alive. The budgeting of survival to exploration need not be so punishing, and I suspect is usually because a game really doesn’t have much to offer. That’s what I want.

So what do you want? Maybe it’s a whole new way of thinking about the first-person shooter. Or an RTS that doesn’t infuriate you by focusing on units when you really care about resources. Are you crying out for a management sim that doesn’t care about the happiness of the people?

Someone will read one of your comments and make a corresponding game. It’s inevitable.

Believe me or not but my dream game is a game about dreams. A game set in a universe where people have dreams machines (much like those in inception), and they become addicted. You are a reporter working on a murder case, and you are not a “user” (a guy addicted to the dream machine).

There are two races in this world (which is a kind of isle, for size sake) and one is a kind of slave race… being less developed than the other race, they have no choice but to have the worse jobs, being underpaid, etc. The thing about the murder is that it goes up to the “council” or whatever — their parliament.

And while investigating it, you get entangled on a conspiracy. It has to do with the dream machine and manipulating people through dreams. When they wake up, they do the controller’s bidding, because the confuse reality with dream.

The most cool thing about the game is that you will enter the dream world — a fantastic, crazy, amorphous world, and then when you came back, the real world will feel like dreaming and half of the game you won’t know whether you are dreaming or not. And make a lot of moral choices along the way.

It may seen like a rip off from inception, but’s not. I don’t remember where I got my inspiration, but I thought about this five years ago. Oh, it should play like an adventure of sorts. Whatever an adventure should play like nowadays.

My dream game would be a Battletech/Mechwarrior fully persistant MMO. Much like EVE Online, or Planetside, the galaxy would function as a single persistant entity, with factions able to capture, hold, and use planets and bases to help in their war effort.

Obviously, the vast majority of the combat would happen on individual planets in mech vs. mech combat, but also fighters, bombers, tanks, infantry, and space combat would also play a large part.

Players would also be able to join mercenary groups who could rent/sell their services to the different factions to help in their war effort, in addition to being able to chose a faction and fighting for them.

There would be a “front lines” so players would always know where the large battles were being fought within the enormous galaxy, and territory could change hands many times over the course of the server’s life.

Take a survival/building game like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress, and combine it with a programming game like SpaceChem or Manufactoria. Rather than directly control agents in the world, players write programs that determine what agents in the world do.

It doesn’t even have to be a 3d spatial world–they could be non-metaphorical (though sandboxed) programs running on the same “operating system”, competing and bargaining with each other for access to shared resources like CPU time, memory, and network bandwidth.

The game I keep starting to make, Frontier Station (generic & instantly forgettable sci-fi names ftw) is a RTS/turtling/tower defence/resource management game. Its direction changes every time I start to work on it (it’s currently basically a simplified Stronghold in space) It basically started out as tower defence in space, then I decided it would be great if you could build non-combat things, like research modules, and maybe then needed habitation modules to provide the crew to man your guns and carry out your research, and then entertainment centres to keep your people happy, etc. I think I was mostly just very affected by PvZ’s approachability, and wanted to try my hand at something similar, complete with asides like the Crazy Dave missions (for example, a mission that’s basically Asteroids but you have no control over your guns — just the ability to maneouver your base).

It will never be finished, but it’s the game I most want to play. That and Skyrim.

The game I would want would be an absolutely massive open world sandbox type of affair, like Fallout 3 except several times larger. In fact, I’d like it to be post-apocalyptic like Fallout 3, but like you John, I’d rather it be more about survival than about shooting stuff in the face. It’d be great for combat and shooting to be involved if you so choose but not really on the same “take on 6 supermutants at once” type and more careful, plodding and dangerous.

I’d like to scrounge through ruins of buildings pulling down light fixtures and prying screws out of stripped and charred beams to fashion really maskeshift weaponry. Found weaponry, like a firearm (civilian grade) would be nice if it was rare and hard to supply ammo for.

The ideal would be a focus on exploring places, and surviving and finding things, all sorts of things. Where finding a jar of nails is like finding a +3 sword. I’d like there to be roving bands of raiders that one would need to avoid (or join?) and I’d like it to be multiplayer too.

I’d say varying levels of equipped, but nothing ridiculous, maybe one or two guys have a shoddy firearm at most with almost no ammo. Of course killing them if you’re on your own or with one or two people would probably be impossible just because you’d be outnumbered. Maybe there would be a way to track them or shadow them and try to steal food and/or a weapon from their camp at night?

And definitely, some dangerous critters about. Realistically dark nights would be cool too, so finding a good place to camp would be a worthwhile endeavor so as to avoid the nocturnal critters and other pitfalls you might not see.

1) An Mass Effect/KOTOR type RPG in warhammer 40K universe with inquisitor as the player character. Space marine as a companion etc. If you become radical you can even team up with some other race such as “tamed” Ork, eldar or tau. If you succumb to the chaos you can team up with daemons.

2) Cyberpunk TURN BASED TACTICAL game. Gameplay-wise similar to jagged alliance or fallout tactics, only in contemporary graphics. Hackers and other cyberpunk freaks, ninjas and human tanks all mixed in tactical combat.

A first person game that takes all the good stuff out of men of war (destruction, armour pen, and crazyness) and plonks it in a open dynamic map of europe, with the streamlined version of the meta game from WW2 online.

Similar to this thing which was overtly ambitious and seemingly never got out of concept.

My dream game would be a bar simulator in the vein of Last Call. Set in the world of Oblivion’s Tamriel, you play a tavern keeper. Select from either ale or wine to give to your customers, provide them with a hot dinner after their long day of standing waiting for the one person who actually buys anything to show up, and listen intently to their stories of mudcrabs and heroes of Kvatch.
You could call it “Maidient AI” or something.

Actually, screw what I said above. Give me a rallying game that generates the races procedurally and looks gorgeous. Also, make the realism scalable so you can be all hardcore if you feel up to it, or just whizz around all arcade-like like you can in Dirt.

When faced with the quandary of a dream game I must be honest with myself. My inner child yearns for something set in the universe of Star Wars, while a very different part leans towards our friends of a more undead persuasion: Zombies. My apologies, Han, it’s zombies today.

[Warning:] If you wish to skip all the wordy bits, and get right to the point. See “Summation” at the very bottom.
I would love to see an open world zombie survival game. I want a massive city, or something more ambitious, and entire state or province. Rather than being cast into the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, I want to be there at its onset. I jets screaming overhead and tanks thundering beside me. I want to be with humanity in her final fight. To see her fury wrought against an enemy that knows no fear and has no end. It would have to be an MMOG (or whatever other grouping of “M’s” and “G’s” means many people together in an online real-time game.)

You are not the hero of the game, in fact, no one player is. There may never be a hero, depending on how you choose to survive. Human players would, if they choose, band together to create safe-havens among the ruins and chaos. as the military attempts to push back the infection. Perhaps my party and I want to assume control of the local mall, and ride out the apocalypse from there. (assuming we had not seen some of the more prevalent zombie flicks.) Or perhaps we wish to make a certain pub our base of operations. (Assuming we saw the relative success of another, very different, film.)
These safe havens would act as the games spawn points. For new players there would be various locations or residences you that you spawn in and will branch out from. Imagine starting in an apartment or house. This is your room. This was once your home, now you must choose to stay and defend it, or seek shelter with the military and government forces. Whereas players who have formed groups can create and spawn at their respective group’s safe haven when entering the game. (To be honest, EVE has this system down in a fairly decent manner. Think along those lines.)

Players, at the onset of the game, have the choice to begin the game in certain factions. Or to join them later. Perhaps you want to join a particular branch of the military while they continue to struggle against infection and gather the many survivors. Flying a Blackhawk helicopter to pick survivors of the roof of buildings long since overrun by the undead, returning them to the relative safety of your base. Perhaps you want to carve your own path through the undead masses, sneaking about and surviving how you can among the cities. Stealing from the foolish survivors, who assume your intentions are for the survival of humanity, and not just yourself. Or perhaps you want to be the everyman. You chose to stay at your home while the infection spread, and now you must choose how to survive.

As for a resolution, I am not sure if there is one. Or if there should be? Perhaps there are a faction of dedicated players who run tests and collect tissue samples in an attempt to slow, stop, or reverse the infection. Perhaps, for these dedicated few, frittering game time away at the bottom of some fallout shelter, the reward would be one day presenting the online community with a viable cure. Or bringing about a worse fate in the process.

In summation:

I want an open world, full of people. It’s EVE meets Left 4 Dead, while on a date with Dead Island. I want to see what decisions people will make. And I want zombies eating those people.

Space Ranger
But not a weird Russian 4x game, rather I’d love to play a game where you play some kind of futuristic ranger that gets to essentially fly around in your ship in an area of space devoid of any civilization, to be able to explore, log details of planets, take photographs, hunt for food etc.
It would be amazing to play a game where you could fly to a planet, leave your ship in orbit, take a landing craft down to the surface, then explore on a jetbike; just get lost really.
I have an image of my character standing on a cliff top overlooking an alien valley, rifle slung over one shoulder, binoculars raised, scanning the horizon as the twin suns of the unnamed world set, the gentle wash of my jet bike distorting the air around me, knowing I was a billion miles from another human being.
Noctis is the only game that even comes close to this, and it’s written in DOS with terrible, incredibly low res graphics, and it’s still magic, so with a next gen engine, procedural planets and flora and fauna, seamless planetary landing etc it would be incredible. It’s also the sort of game that could be made by a small team, as you wouldn’t need tons of art assets, just to make a really good engine.
Needless to say the next time I have a few million quid to spare this game is getting made.

As an aside, interesting to note how many people’s dream game revolves around freedom, and how at the same time big publishers are so focused away from giving it to you in favour of yet another corridor shooter.

Don’t know if it’s already been mentioned, but every once in a while this pops into my head and I can’t get it out again for a while. I’ve even brought it up in an RPS comments thread before, and everybody agreed it had to be made.
Necromunda but on the PC.

i want a first person shooter with everything we love about the shooting stuff. PLUS… i want progress. i dont want levels though. i want to progress through crafting guns, equipment, vehicles…
i want it to be open world+instanced. open world for exploration, collecting materials, eventually hunt rare enemies and mybe some skirmish against other players. instanced in hubs, like cities and “arenas” where you can do your normal fps business. different arenas for different game modes. deathmatch, team deathmatch, ctf and so forth.
so, you basicly idle or do your business in the hubs, meet other players, look at their equipment… and you can invite other players you meet in hubs to do some instances (arenas).
so, basicly its something like world of warcraft but without questing and with guns of course. just a shooter with some crafting and city hubs in an open world enviroment.

maybe something like rage by id software, but bigger and with a persistent world.

First person (or third person) shooter where anything is a weapon. Environments are quite sandboxy.

Pretty standard so far…but I want there to be a realistic number of enemies. Say, for an 8 hour plus game, I want a maximum of 20 enemies. Each one like a mini boss fight. I guess AI needs to come on leaps and bounds before this would work, but I’m sick of games where you fight private armies consisting of thousands of identical enemies.

What if you are blessed/plagued by a seemingly endless number of dreams? At some point you just need to pick one and start exploring it.
Here’s what occupies a lot of my mind these days:link to forums.tigsource.com

My game takes place in a procedurally generated world that is completely controlled by voxel interactions. It is fantasy, so the physics are not exactly like our world, we have created our own, just to make it simple and fun. Each block is an element, and each element has different property, and a different interaction with the other elements. For example:

Earth, stays still and does not move as long as it is touching another firm block.
Sand, is like earth, but it will fall if nothing is underneath it.
Air, empty blocks are not empty! They are Air.
Fire, goes upward, ignighting the air into fire and then vanishing.
Water, flows downward, using simplified fluid dynamics.

Now all of these elements can combine. Like sand or earth touching Fire will make Lava, which flows like Water but more slowly, until it cools to make Glass. Water and Earth will combine to make Ooze, which can eventually spawn Ferns, which will in turn create forests, and life. Air and Water combine to make Storms, storms create lightning, etc. Some of these things I speak of, like Ferns and Lightning, are not voxels, but are rather effects of the interactions of voxels that spawn into the world around them.

Now if you say “wait that sounds just like minecraft” well, hear me out. The world is filled with portals that produce these materials continuously: pouring them into the world. You take the role of a Geomancer, a wizard capable of closing and opening these portals. Your fellow players are also Geomancers.

The other inhabitants of our world are Dragons, born from eggs that are found and nutured in the elements. A dragon will be useful as it will be your method of rapid transit, and also something to do battle using its breath weapon. Each dragon is born of the element it came out of and its characteristics and breath weapon are similar (think Panzer Dragoon RPG here).

Your mobs opponents are Demons and Angels. Demons spawn en-masse from the elements, and you have to battle them like you would hordes of zombies. You can either kill them using your dragon, or cleverly summon an elemental nexus to say, wash them away with a flow of water.

Angels on the other hand are massive beasts that many players must combine forces to defeat.

Your reward for destroying enemies and exploring the land is greater geomantic powers, which makes it possible for you to shape the world to a greater and greater extent. Go from building flying islands to flying continents. Shape the world into your own vision but be aware, its dynamic and can be changed at any time.

Collect angel and demon kills, and possibly player kills on pvp servers. This isn’t meant to be a giant MMO, just a fun diversion from your other games to play for a few weeks.

That’s quite a beautiful concept. You could probably mod Minecraft to do it, although there’d be big trouble with the MP bits and it wouldn’t be pretty enough to do the concept justice if I’m honest.

Minecraft vlox are OK and certainly quick to pick up, but some kind of flow-based far smaller voxel engine would be totally awesome. You’d need to stream zones, of course, because otherwise handling the sheer number of voxels needed for an open world would be crushing, even if you didn’t write it in hideously unoptimised Java. A lot of them could be recorded in the form of procedural models and existing states, though, which would save on data to a great degree if it could be achieved. You simply mark spawns when the player alters them in a non-procedural-flow fashion (digging etc) and record their entire state then. So if the primary interaction with the world is via these elemental powers, then it could be done with considerably less juice.

There’s real mileage in this idea, I think. Although I must admit I spend a bit too much of my time thinking about procedural content generation.

Might be more feasable to attempt it in side-view 2D first- the fluid calculations are “one dimension cheaper” and the gameplay would still work. It would lack the ooh and awww factor but running those fluid sims in 3D is wayyyy beyond my skill level as an engineer and scientist.

RPG in any form that, while also letting you succeed any task, also lets you fail at any task ever. which won’t be made due to the amount of deviance in the story due to that. but still…. it would be cool to be able to fail (or run away from) a nuclear bomb and then go back to explore the wasteland you’ve created by not doing that.

or if you fail delivering that important message to that outpost over there, they’ll just keep acting on what they know, and thus dooming themselves.

yaknow, stuff like in most games would lead to an instant “Game over” screen.

Oh, and a Civilisation RTS. But each level is a different planet. When the game begins it randomly generates food stuffs, animals building materials etc, and your race starts as cavemen. You then need to experiement to see what the things you start near are (uh-oh those berries are poisonous, ooh poisonous darts!) and then build you strategy around that. As research is expensive, i might have found a creature that is my main source of food, meaning my town gets larger more quickly. You however have trained it to be ridden, giving your more military units.

Playing Civ where you get horses, gunpowder, oil etc, and every game having teh same resources isn’t as fun as getting a new world and discovering what the things you find do with experimentation and research. Oooh, these rocks explode on impact, i only lost 3 warriors experiementing, now i’m bloody dangerous.

So basically invent a set of natural laws and have the machine work out the ramifications, then play a sort of close-up Civ discovering those natural laws and how to best exploit them? Sort of emergent Civ? Very cool idea.

I don’t know about dream game but following the comment trend of role reversal… I’ve always been interested in a GTA where you played as a police officer or detective. We’ll see how LA Noire turns out.

I’d like to see a mixture of minecraft and civ put forth as an MMO of Eve proportions. Think about that for a second why don’t you.

STALKER came close, I have high hopes for stalker 2. In a dream world the STALKER guys would work with bioware writers and maybe get Warren Spector to consult, or better yet work with the Witcher guys.

I feel STALKER would be perfect with more feeling of making choices in the plot, of course the best plot choices come when you don’t realise you’re making a plot choice.

I’ve been thinking of a game that is sort of about exploring, and sort of about traveling, set in a medieval tech level fantasy world. The idea would be that there are two towns separated by some intense wilderness, yet there are extreme demands for trade between the two, and that is where you come in, you are the guide that gets people there.

The whole strength of this would be that you have a vast landscape of mountains, rivers, cliffs, hills forests etc between both towns. Then the wilderness needs to be populated with dynamic changing things.

One important part is I would want there to be an intense climbing mechanic. I think trying to scale difficult terrain is something that isn’t done enough. The best type of climbing I see in games are maybe assassins creed style jump puzzles, but even better would be something that is just a bit more challenging, where you have to worry about falling and/or sliding down. In the case of being a guide, you would have to work with your party in which you might need to scale a section then secure ropes so the non climbers can get up, or even rig up some sort of winch/pulley cart thing.

In the wilderness you would have different animal groups, packs of wolves that are attracted to say deer, so if you spot a bunch of deer you know there could be wolves around. There would be various bandit camps that have patrols, so there might be a road you could travel for part of the way, but you would know ahead of time that there are bandit patrols, so you have to skirt around a section by scaling a cliff and swimming half way down a river.

I’d like there to be some rough tracker element, a way to read trails and see what came by. Having a skill based RPG element here would be good, as you get better at tracking you can read better what has crossed by in the past. This also could lead to elements where NPC’s are chasing you and you have to somehow juke them in the forest through some tracking tricks. I know fantasy novels very frequently have this sort of long chase sequence, but I haven’t really seen it captured in a game yet.

I think the action should be very ‘action oriented’, sort of like m&b style, where it isn’t combo mashing or using special skills. I think you want to keep the feeling very real and visceral and grounded. It’s you vs the wilderness, and you need to get these people through.

I think each town should be sort of a living breathing thing, but basically the hub where you gain missions and reptuation. You could have all sorts of things, like needing to get a family fleeing to the other town through, a criminal whom is being chased/hunted by the guards, an important noble needs to get smuggled across to the other town. A merchant caravan needs to get through, some regular travelers just need to ride by and want you to help.

Each job you do should build reputation, gain you money, allow you to buy new/better gear to give you more options. More importantly each time you venture out you learn the lay of the land a little more, and the various routes to avoid troubles…but the troubles move. Wild animals change dens, bandit camps get destroyed by guard patrols and/or pick up and move. A town might decide at some point to seal entry into their lands so you have to get around their roadblocks.

I think there is a lot of room for a really cool sandbox game built around traversing the wilderness between two towns and getting hired/leading people through with you.

I’ve always thought a game where you’re a Tracker would be great. Those are the best parts of many fantasy novels. Doing stuff like piecing together tracks, broken foliage, etc in order to recreate a scene; figuring out what direction your target it headed based on natural clues; figuring out how to navigate impossible terrain.
There needs to be a game like that. Like, at all.
But your idea with the towns sounds like a good start.

A modern remake of the best levels from Thief 1 and 2, faithful to those games’ gameplay.
Thief 3 ruined a lot with:
– third person (only the fact that you cast a shadow was good about that, but making you walk in a weird way just because it needs to look good in the third person is bad)
– wrong choice of engine (the maps were cut in half and sometimes in even more pieces, because the game was designed for the consoles and not the PC)
– much simpler maps (because console players are dumb and even if they were given a map of a complex place they wouldn’t enjoy the game)
– failed concept of open-world
– side-missions which you may miss
– mission intro videos replaced by blue walls of text

Just make the game first-person, make it hard, make it complex so that you lose yourself Even when using a map, make the PC version a proper PC version and do whatever you want with the console version, and make it in the standard mission after mission convention, keeping those great intro videos.

I would love to see a game where surviving is the ultimate goal, without the tedium of managing unrealistic water and food levels and such, as John said. I mean really, it can’t be that hard to come up with a realistic hunger and thirst model right? Sorry, lost track for a second, but back to it:

However, I think conflict drives great dynamic storytelling (at least for me), and there is no greater conflict than the human condition, so I would like to see something that plays off of that. Ideally, there would be some kind of “event” and probably on an isolated apocalyptic level, none of this “end of the world” business. For example, the US has some sort of apocalyptic event, but the rest of the world has gone with the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality, so there would be a sense of being left to rebuild on your own, without the assistance of other nations. The conflict would come in through some sort of clan/faction interaction as well as basic survival (shelter, food, resources, etc.). Basically, as groups of people band together to survive, inevitably the resources become harder to find. These groups can clash with one another or even join together into a larger group; strength in numbers and such. So, there would be, in some sense, a political aspect to the game.. trying to balance the needs of those in your care, as well as weighing the benefits of joining together with other people. I think moral decisions would be created dynamically out of this, balancing the needs of individuals against the “greater good.”

My idea of this is that you would sort of start on your own, maybe even set up your own beginning story (Origins style?) and then survive individually until you either join with a group, or start your own group. You could feasibly solo it, but of course, survival is easier in numbers. Combat would NOT be the focus, and would be different based on if you went solo or in a group. Individually, the combat would probably happen more often, but on a smaller scale while inter-faction combat would happen less frequently but on a larger scale.

In terms of survival, there is the scavenging aspect, but also there would be a sense of “rediscovering” lost abilities, maybe through some form of research mechanic. Having people learn to farm for instance, would be far more useful to a group of people, and would make food less of a concern in the long term. On the other hand, your settlement would now be more attractive to other factions, who would now have more of a reason to try and take over. There would need to be a reasonable trade-off between becoming more self-sufficient as a group and adding in other forms of conflict.

Anyway, just some thoughts. Maybe I could add a “calm survival” mode so people don’t have to always deal with the stress of conflict :)

For me it would be a online RPG with perma-death … but where its not as bad as it sounds because part of the game is building your dynasty and delegating an heir for when the big day comes. When you die (which should be quite hard to achieve of course) your heir would inherit ‘heirloom’ gear and would have been in training while you adventured. Also other members of your family could become your shopkeepers, bankers or whatever.
Anyone up for making it for me? :)

Mine would pretty much be an amalgamation of EVE, Battlefield, PlanetSide and X-Wing.

Take PlanetSide as a template, and then add the following:

A fully persistent one server galaxy like EVE.
Ground combat with the feel of the Battlefield series.
Space combat like X-Wing. With the same diversity of craft as PlanetSide.

And then I might as well just insert what I added to my PlanetSide Next survey, as that’s also what I’d want my dream game to do:

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT!

A combination of space combat and planetside combat, with shared objectives between the two.
So imagine if you could take the last battle from Return of the Jedi, where a war was being waged on Endor and in space above it, and there are shared objectives between the two. So the battle planetside involves disabling the shield generators to allow the Rebels to attack the Death Star. And only when the generators are down can they proceed with the attack. If you could translate the cool factor and scale of that kind of experience to PS, I could die a happy man.

The one thing that gets slightly old is the unwinnable war situation. One way to remedy this would be to create a persistent world, but have areas of the universe unlock in a manner that suggests an ongoing campaign. When the different Empires complete objectives, it would advance the story, and unlock the next chapter of the campaign/story.
You would move on to the next campaign, or there may be the opportunity of doing something else to give you a chance at winning back a previous system.

The most interesting battles I’ve had have been out in the open, moving from one base to the next. An important requirement for me would be for more possibilities of this type of action.
There’s a couple of ways you could achieve this :
I’d like to see more objectives out in the open, so not just capture a base.
But maybe capture other important strategic objectives, like shield generators or relay stations, that sort of thing. And for those objectives to give tangible benefits during the campaign.
Another way to make these dynamic battle lines possible is to have movable command ships/command bases. So Outift leads can only command and issue orders, get access to orbital strikes etc, when they are in a command ship. And all the Outfit leaders would have to be in the same ship. And if it had a particular range, then the battle would naturally flow out from the command ships. It would then be extra important to defend them as well.

Other important requirements for me are :

A persistent world

Varied layouts and styles of bases/space stations.

Retaining the skill factor of the traditional PS, through CoF, and highly skilled weapon types like the Lancer.

Keep the Cert Points system, and then extend it to cover additional areas like space ships.

Retain the high diversity of weapons and vehicles, both ground and air, and also translate that to space combat.

Place a very strong focus on Outfits, I’d love to see Outfits be able to create their own bases/space stations, and upgrade them with Outfit points.
You could even make these attackable by the opposing empires.

Have a working VOIP technology and embed it into the UI.
So commanders should be able to communicate to squad/platoon leaders by simply clicking on them through some sort of UI system when they are managing their squads/platoons.

For commanders/outfit leaders/platoon leaders/squad leaders to interact and deliver order through more of an RTS style interface.

A first person tribal real time strategy – the player is the leader of a tribe and orders them about (Ug, go and collect wood, Ogg, construct a wood hut). Rather than simply constructing buildings (such as huts), players would construct ’tiles’ or ‘blocks’ (e.g. one tile wood be a panel of wall) which they could use to create their own buildings.

Sort of like a cross between dwarf fortress, populous and minecraft.

I’ve been thinking about this game forever, ONE DAY I shall acquire the skills to create it!

A genreless game in which you interact with unusual objects, ideas or people within a series of atmospheric vignettes — like a hybrid of Rez, Killer7, Osada and various scenes from the Codex Seraphinianus. It wouldn’t have any storytelling nonsense in it — just interactivity and decent music (a bit of procedural generation wouldn’t go amiss too). And no multiplayer.

Hopefully it could have interesting gameplay which did not resemble the pulling of levers in an art gallery.

I’ve always wanted a game where you are lost in deep space in a ship and you have to repair it. Also in said game I should seamlesly be able to exit the ship via airlock and do repairs on the exterier as well.

It should avoid my pet peeve in space games: everything is too close together and too big.

I am interested in games that put you in a dangerous situation then lets you explore. You may be able to talk to people. You may have to scavenge for weapons or supplies. You may choose just to hide and hope the bad things go away.

The environment is open. Go anywhere that you could get to in real life.

Whatever you do, other things take place. You can replay the game and try different things out, experience different stories. So far it sounds a bit like ‘It Came From The Desert’ on the Amiga.

Action would come in erratic bursts, with long periods of tension when you never feel safe, but nothing overt need be taking place.

However it goes beyond that. The actions you take may change what NPCs and mobs do. I have imagined in the past a sort of proof of concept based around the original film Halloween. A neighbourhood to explore. A killer on the loose. Where will you go? Who will you visit? What if that attracts the killer? Or, just as bad, what if he then goes off to kill other people first while you are rooting through drawers for a knife in the dark? By the time you go for help there might not be any.

As a proof of concept it could be a game that lasts a few hours, but with lots of replay potential.

Then for a full game I’m going to be egotistical. I wrote a popular horror/thriller called Turner – link to authonomy.com. No literary merit but the premise of a whole island to explore, and various dangers and places to explore. The novel tells the story of what a few characters experience: I would love for it to become a game along the lines I have described, with different stories emerging. Where would you go? Would you ally with anyone or have a better chance of surviving alone? Which buildings would you explore? Would you encounter the murderers, or the Bwystfil, or die trying to swim to the mainland or falling off the cliffs in the storm? In your first game things would inevitably go badly. But after replays, and trying different things, you would have a better idea of how to survive. And the main feature would be the reaction of the world. If you put the light on in the lighthouse it might attract some murderers who otherwise might have killed the campers; finding the gun could lead to you killing the man who was going to wreck the boats, offering a potential escape route. All the actions would cause butterfly-effect ripples that change the outcomes.

Whatever happens the ending would be like the original Fallout 1 and 2, where you would find out what became of the different characters and factions. If the game worked out then it could be seen as a trial for something like this again, but on an even larger scale.

I’ve replayed this in my head many times as a game, in much greated details than I have put here!

Sci-Fi RPG with space, air and ground battles, orbiting weapons, boarding ships (hack them to open the airlocks and blast the crew into space! sneak on and sabotage the engines so they go kaboom!), real time atmospheric reentry, a physics and combat engine that allows realistic damage (use a beam weapon to burn a hole in a capital ship, then fly through it or jump out into your spacesuit and board the ship), X-style economy, epic scope with multiple inhabited planets and all kinds of interesting space things like black holes, neutron stars, randomly roaming asteroids and that kind of thing.

Also, a contemporary open world RPG where you play someone trying to liberate a city from the occupying government. Can do your thing sneakily by building up your standing in the city, getting rich and moving into politics to subvert it from the inside, start a grassroots political campaign or insight a violent revolution with car bombs and assassinations. Recruit people to help you, wear disguises and be mindful of CCTV and mobile phone tracking with a persistent police force chasing (no GTA style instant respray, you’ll have to change your hair colour, wear contacts, change clothes).

Take the core gameplay and open-ended-ness of Sid Meier’s Pirates, replace the Caribbean with a space setting like Privateer/Freelancer, take the concept of Heavy Rain’s evolving narrative and fine tune it for “generic” but varied adventures/conversations/events that are both random and based upon your choices/tendencies, and figure out a way to translate the nebulous concept of luck into health/ability/skills.

Features include:
-Bounty Hunter Nemesis system
-Forward-Only Conversations where you try to strike a balance between not getting screwed, getting a good deal, and getting the job.
-Romances
-Smuggling
-Unique ship customization where upgrades mean complexity and may lead to system failure that you may have to jury rig mid-fight
-Copilots
-Treachery and Backstabbing
-Player-driven self-realized narrative
-A finite adventure that encourages replay not because you missed one or two things because you went evil or good, but because to genuinely have another adventure different from the last one

If I have a little more dream left over, it would be set in the Star Wars universe and let me fulfill my Han Solo fantasy, because I can’t stand that lightsaber wank.

The first bit reminds me of Space Rangers. I loved Pirates too, I played it for a whole summer on the Amiga. Space Rangers really reminded me of that. It even has text-adventure parts so you start to empathise with your character as more than just a spaceship icon.

There are two bits of my brain that enjoy games – there’s the problem-solving part that likes crosswords and jigsaw puzzles and logic problems, and there’s the escapist part that loves film and theatre and great writing. I want a game that appeals to both. And preferably has something to say while it does it.

I want characters that make me laugh and cry and fall a little bit in love – and that don’t come out of the Great Big Book of Pulp Clichés.
I want baddies that I hate and fear and maybe come to respect a little at the end.
I want a world that draws me in completely, and yet adapts to the way I want to play with it. And crucially does all this without letting me see the strings.
I want gameplay that tests me without frustrating me. That demands I develop skills but gives me the wherewithal to perfect them. That gives me the adrenaline thrill of thinking I’m not quite going to make it, and the intellectual pleasure of being given some tools and a task and working out how one opens up the other.

I’d also like a fast car, a million pounds, and a house in Tuscany, please.